What Do We Think About Climate Change

Speaking of consensus.....

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Text .By PATRICK J. MICHAELS
Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).

But there's something much, much worse going on—a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."

The bible I'm referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It's our canon, and it's all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.



Martin Kozlowski
.That can no longer be the case. The alliance of scientists at East Anglia, Penn State and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (in Boulder, Colo.) has done its best to bias it.

A refereed journal, Climate Research, published two particular papers that offended Michael Mann of Penn State and Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. One of the papers, published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas (of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), was a meta-analysis of dozens of "paleoclimate" studies that extended back 1,000 years. They concluded that 20th-century temperatures could not confidently be considered to be warmer than those indicated at the beginning of the last millennium.

In fact, that period, known as the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP), was generally considered warmer than the 20th century in climate textbooks and climate compendia, including those in the 1990s from the IPCC.

Then, in 1999, Mr. Mann published his famous "hockey stick" article in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), which, through the magic of multivariate statistics and questionable data weighting, wiped out both the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent "Little Ice Age" (a cold period from the late 16th century to the mid-19th century), leaving only the 20th-century warming as an anomaly of note.

Messrs. Mann and Wigley also didn't like a paper I published in Climate Research in 2002. It said human activity was warming surface temperatures, and that this was consistent with the mathematical form (but not the size) of projections from computer models. Why? The magnitude of the warming in CRU's own data was not as great as in the models, so therefore the models merely were a bit enthusiastic about the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Mr. Mann called upon his colleagues to try and put Climate Research out of business. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal," he wrote in one of the emails. "We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."

After Messrs. Jones and Mann threatened a boycott of publications and reviews, half the editorial board of Climate Research resigned. People who didn't toe Messrs. Wigley, Mann and Jones's line began to experience increasing difficulty in publishing their results.

This happened to me and to the University of Alabama's Roy Spencer, who also hypothesized that global warming is likely to be modest. Others surely stopped trying, tiring of summary rejections of good work by editors scared of the mob. Sallie Baliunas, for example, has disappeared from the scientific scene.

GRL is a very popular refereed journal. Mr. Wigley was concerned that one of the editors was "in the skeptics camp." He emailed Michael Mann to say that "if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official . . . channels to get him ousted."

Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Wigley on Nov. 20, 2005 that "It's one thing to lose 'Climate Research.' We can't afford to lose GRL." In this context, "losing" obviously means the publication of anything that they did not approve of on global warming.

Soon the suspect editor, Yale's James Saiers, was gone. Mr. Mann wrote to the CRU's Phil Jones that "the GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership there."

It didn't stop there. Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory complained that the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) was now requiring authors to provide actual copies of the actual data that was used in published papers. He wrote to Phil Jones on March 19, 2009, that "If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available—raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations—I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals."

Messrs. Jones and Santer were Ph.D. students of Mr. Wigley. Mr. Santer is the same fellow who, in an email to Phil Jones on Oct. 9, 2009, wrote that he was "very tempted" to "beat the crap" out of me at a scientific meeting. He was angry that I published "The Dog Ate Global Warming" in National Review, about CRU's claim that it had lost primary warming data.

The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed. Mr. Wigley repeatedly tells news reporters not to listen to "skeptics" (or even nonskeptics like me), because they didn't publish enough in the peer-reviewed literature—even as he and his friends sought to make it difficult or impossible to do so.

Ironically, with the release of the Climategate emails, the Climatic Research Unit, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley have dramatically weakened the case for emissions reductions. The EPA claimed to rely solely upon compendia of the refereed literature such as the IPCC reports, in order to make its finding of endangerment from carbon dioxide. Now that we know that literature was biased by the heavy-handed tactics of the East Anglia mob, the EPA has lost the basis for its finding.

Mr. Michaels, formerly professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia (1980-2007), is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.



This is the type of tactic used to achieve a consensus on AGW. Another favorite tactic is to try and intimidate by using the argument from authority by citing abstract numbers that support the AGW theory, such as 97%. Boston loves to use that number, again and again and again, so it is important to debunk it every so often. "97% percent of all scientists agree" he repeats mantra like. The problem is the number is bogus and no many how many times he repeats bogus information, it cannot become the truth. Where does the 97% come from???? Well there was anonymous survey done by a college lab assistant among 2000 or so self identified "climate scientists". Out of the 2000 contacted, 372 responded, and of the 372 97% did indeed support the AGW theoryor so the lab assistant reported as he never listed the names of those who replied in the affirmative. Now there's science at work for you! The balance probably concluded, as most scientists do, that a poll on a theory is silly and irrelevent, the facts and the truth count. So it would seem that Bostons oft claimed chant of 97% is not just a distortion, but an outright lie, something we are used to from him.

 

More on consensus..........

of Scientists’ Open Letter To U.S. Senators: ‘Claim of consensus is fake’
Science group ‘reviewing its stance on global warming’ after 160 physicists sign petition

Monday, November 02, 2009 – By Marc Morano – Climate Depot

The following letter was sent to all 100 U.S. Senator’s on October 29, 2009 by a team of scientists. The letter is reproduced in full below:

A GAGGLE IS NOT A CONSENSUS

You have recently received a letter from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), purporting to convey a “consensus” of the scientific community that immediate and drastic action is needed to avert a climatic catastrophe.

We do not seek to make the scientific arguments here (we did that in an earlier letter, sent a couple of months ago), but simply to note that the claim of consensus is fake, designed to stampede you into actions that will cripple our economy, and which you will regret for many years. There is no consensus, and even if there were, consensus is not the test of scientific validity. Theories that disagree with the facts are wrong, consensus or no.

We know of no evidence that any of the “leaders” of the scientific community who signed the letter to you ever asked their memberships for their opinions, before claiming to represent them on this important matter.

You can do physics without climatology, but you can’t do climatology without physics.
We also note that the American Physical Society (APS, and we are physicists) did not sign the letter, though the scientific issues at stake are fundamentally matters of applied physics. You can do physics without climatology, but you can’t do climatology without physics.

The APS is at this moment reviewing its stance on so-called global warming, having received a petition from its membership to do so. That petition was signed by 160 distinguished members and fellows of the Society, including one Nobelist and 12 members of the National Academies. Indeed a score of the signers are Members and Fellows of the AAAS, none of whom were consulted before the AAAS letter to you.

Professor Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

Professor Fred Singer, University of Virginia

Professor Will Happer, Princeton University

Professor Larry Gould, University of Hartford

 

Another little ditty on the way the whole fraud was constructed, this is a long one, hit the head first........

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf

 

Btw, I couldn't find JoNova or SPPI in the payroll records of ExxonMobil.

 

Maybe the same guys that kicked the Russians out of Afganistan, paid, trained and armed the Taliban and Al Qaeda?

 

it has been recorded by satellites for the past few decades using altimetry and are accurate to within 2 mm. So there is no denying that sea level is rising.

 

The land is going down so it makes it look like the sea is coming up?
and Mt Everest is much higer than when Edmund Hillary climbed it.
So are all the ocean heights referenced to the land as it will be different everywhere you go.

One side of Australia is going down and the other up for example
We have a reservoir ( un used) that has enough water in it for 1000ltrs for every person on the planet
and in the monsoon we could empty and refill it and rain fall has been increasing in that area for 20 years.

 

As a scientist I know without a doubt when I hear this I am listening to political speak and not science speak. This statement is the very statement that turns me off the most and causes me to be 97% skeptical of the AGW crowd. All else after this statement is shut out completely by my ears. This statement does the most disservice to your cause that you could possibly say cuz it screams politics and not science.

 

foramanifera are the organisms i was referring to.
Here is the reason one article regarding sea level rise was retracted from a journal, Nature Geoscience:

Now, AGW deniers claimed at first that the paper was retracted because it was flawed and over estimated the effects. Wrong- the paper was retracted because it DRASTICALLY underestimated the rise.
Report from the scientists who pointed the flaws out:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/08/ups-and-downs-of-sea-level-projections/

 

nice try at a little double speak yourself there Pierre
( Nice to see a Frenchman chiming in though, and welcome to the party )
I think we all know the major effort of climate deniers is expended in the political arena given that the scientific arena is largely decided on this issue.
Poitics is all the deniers really have left and so in order to take the fight to them
well
one must understand the language of politics
you might read the following to get you started on the political agenda designed to stifle the science

speaking of which

from the article someone presented attempting to refute the dangers of ocean acidification

 

from
http://toryardvaark.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/climategate-where-has-al-gore-gone/
Just a few months ago now Al Gore was all over MSM like fleas on a hedgehog, but since Climategate and a brief dalliance in a broom cupboard with Gordon Brown the Pope of the Church of Climatology has dropped off the radar. A couple of less than convincing calls to prayer on Gore’s blog this year, other than that silence has been deafening.

American Thinker floats the idea that Gore has been advised to lie low by legal counsel:
He may be the leader of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) movement, but he’s not defending it in public, not even when it’s falling apart and his new fortune is based upon it.

Mr. Gore and his financial backers earned millions of dollars in start-up “green” companies and carbon trading schemes. If the scam worked, he could’ve become the first “carbon billionaire.”

It’s impossible to predict how many lawsuits, or what kind, might arise once everyone realizes that the AGW scam dwarfs Bernie Madoff’s $50-billion Ponzi operation. New studies appear almost daily that further undercut AGW theory. The biggest daily newspaper in the Netherlands vindicated that country’s leading AGW critic in the article “Henk Tennekes — He was right after all.”

Since 1970, the scope of RICO cases has grown far beyond prosecuting mafia operations. The law firm Nixon Peabody explained:

RICO was written in broad terms. To state a claim, a plaintiff must allege four elements: (1) conduct (2) of an enterprise (3) through a pattern (4) of racketeering activity… Each element of a RICO claim requires additional analysis: an “enterprise” is marked by association and control; a “pattern” requires a showing of “continuity” — continuous and related behavior that amounts to, or poses a threat of, continued criminal violations; and “racketeering activity” involves the violation of designated federal laws …

If more AGW-destroying news rolls in, and if Gore’s “green” companies lose significant value, then shareholder derivative lawsuits and/or state RICO lawsuits will follow — more so as the losses grow.

Mr. Gore is in hiding today — no longer the “courageous” leader of the AGW movement. Apparently, Planet Earth is “no longer in grave danger” or “needing to be saved,” but Gore could lose all of his ill-gotten assets.
?

 

Marco
I noticed in post 4822 that the article cited is an op ed piece and not a peer reviewed work as implied in the content

claims to be published ( in extreemely light letters as if hoping the reader will skim over the claim ) but then goes on to a strange and eerily telling non-description of where
specifically

Published March 19, 2009 Uncategorized

this article was not apparently peer reviewed for errors and yet apparently is trying to pass itself off as a scientific paper on the subject


kinda deceitful isnt it
certainly not the honest and forthcoming pride with which most papers advertise there laurels

kinda makes me wonder
"now why would the authors do that eh"

another thing I find interesting is that the place it was printed is a classic ultra right wing blog spot

last two entries were of some additional note

 

What kind of scientist are you?

Are you disagreeing that an overwhelming majority of mainstream scientists worldwide believe AGW to be real?

It's beyond absurd to see you complaining that people are talking politics instead of science when they support it. If you go through this thread, you'll find rant after rant arguing against AGW on political grounds, rather than on scientific ones.

Go ahead: count the number of posts telling us this is a liberal plot to take away our freedoms; a socialist scheme to destroy capitalism; a capitalistic plan to team up with the government to squeeze money out of the populace, an Illuminati/Bilderberger/Masonic/whatever conspiracy to destroy our governments and economies and impose a New World Order, etc.

Then turn on your radio, and listen to right wing commentator after commentator make the same sort of lame-brained accusations, completely for political reasons. If politics in place of science turns you off, your battery should have been completely disconnected and your ignition key tossed into a dumpster a long time ago....

 

Deceit is a good definition of the actions at East Anglia in concert with American Universities and the IPCC.

 

Research literature
What is written

What it means

It has long been known that...
I haven't bothered to look up the reference, but...

While it has not been possible to provide definite answers to these questions...
The experiment didn't work out, but I figured I could at least get a publication out of it.

The following conditioning system was chosen to study the problem.
The lab next door already had the equipment set up.

Three samples were chosen for detailed study.
The results on the others didn't make sense and were ignored.

Accidentally strained during mounting.
Dropped on the floor.

Handled with extreme care throughout the experiment.
Not dropped on the floor.

Typical results are shown.
The best results are shown, i.e. those that I expected.

Agreement with predicted curve: Excellent / Good / Satisfactory / Fair
Fair / Poor / Doubtful / Imaginary

Correct within an order of magnitude.
Wrong.

Of great theoretical and practical importance.
Interesting to me.

It is suggested that... it is believed that... it appears that...
I think that...

It is generally believed that...
A couple of other people think so too.

The most reliable results are those obtained by Jones.
Jones was my graduate student.

Fascinating work.
Work by a member of our group.

Of doubtful significance.
Work done by someone else.

It is clear that much additional work will be required before complete understanding.
I don't understand it.

A quantitative theory to account for these results has yet to be formulated.
I can't think of one and neither can anyone else.

Thanks are due to Glotz for assistance and Doe for valuable discussion.
Glotz did the work and Doe explained what it meant.

Extremely high purity.
Composition unknown, except for the exaggerated claims of the supplier.

Presumably/at longer times.
I didn't take the time to find out.

Trivial.
It took me a whole week to figure it out.

We have obtained...
We have borrowed, and we don't intend to return it.


http://www.gdargaud.net/Humor/QuotesScience.html